Red Ruby Heart in a Cold Blue Sea (9781101559833) (26 page)

47

D
espite our stubborn streaks and our disagreements about Stella, I missed Daddy something awful. I had never realized how much his being just across the road had kept me moving in some kind of direction. My insides spun in circles, searching for north. Still I got on with it, as I'm sure Daddy would have told me to do. About one hundred times a day I doubled over with grief, but I rode it until I could move again.

One early Sunday morning in August, shortly after Daddy's burial at sea and just after the sixth anniversary of Carlie's disappearance, I sat on the porch in my rocker, looking at the water and thinking about how it wouldn't be too long before all of us were gone to dust or became cookie crumbs for bottom-feeders. “That's a happy thought, Florine,” I said. “You keep that up.” I turned to look at the boats to clear my head.

The
Florine
moped at her mooring, where she'd been since Daddy's death. The
Maddie Dee
rocked close beside her. Suddenly the
Florine
lurched as if she was being goosed from underneath. The wake moved over to rock the
Maddie Dee
. Then, from around the
Florine
's bow, came Daddy's dinghy. The rower sat back to me, but I could tell it was a woman with a black cloud of hair. Stella. She was having trouble rowing in a straight line. She jerked hard one way, then the other, as she made her way to the wharf. When she finally reached it, she hauled herself up onto the dock as if she was wearing cement shoes.

“She's drunker than a skunk,” I said out loud. Securing the dinghy's line to the tie-off took her another good part of forever, but finally she zigzagged up the ramp. As she staggered up the road, I began to think about helping her, but before I could move she bent over and puked up a bucket full of brown liquid right outside Bud's house.

Evidently, Ida had been watching her, too. She came out of the house with a washrag and handed it to Stella so that she could mop her face with it. Then she put her arm around Stella and helped her up the hill to Daddy's house. She came out about ten minutes later and hurried down to her own house to get ready for church.

Later that afternoon, a strange blue car pulled into Daddy's driveway. A stout woman got out and walked right into the house like she meant it. She didn't come out, and after a while I went about my day. I was weeding the flowers in the side garden when the screen door across the road slammed. I looked up to see Stella come out of the house. The stout woman beside her carried two suitcases in her hands. She opened the trunk of her car, tossed them inside, and slammed it shut. Stella caught me looking at her and they both walked up the driveway until they stood in front of me. I saw that they had the same gray eyes.

“This is my sister, Grace,” Stella said to me. “This is Florine,” she said to Grace.

Grace and I didn't exchange any pleased-to-meet-yous. The way she scowled at me made the skin on my face shrivel. I could just imagine what Stella had told her about me. Grace said, “I came to take Stella with me. Think you can watch the house until she comes back?”

“Probably,” I said.

“Just a few plants to water,” Stella said. “I left Grace's number on the kitchen table. I'll be in touch.” She gave me a clumsy hug and I put my arms around her to hold her up. She clutched at me and whispered in my ear, “I don't blame you, you know.” Then she let go. Grace glared at me again and she and Stella went back to the car, got in, and left.

Dottie stopped by later that day. “Did you know that Stella has a sister?” I asked her. “Her name is Grace. Looks like Stella except there's more of her.”

“No,” Dottie said. “But Stella probably has a whole family we never even heard of.”

“Well, you'd think I'd know,” I said.

Dottie shrugged. “You been busy.”

“Stella said she didn't blame me.”

“For what?”

“Daddy dying. She was right. I was hard on him.” Sadness washed over me.

“You didn't do nothing that wasn't normal for what was going on at the time,” Dottie said. “Nobody's perfect. Not you. Not Leeman. Not Stella. Not even me, though I come close.”

I had to agree with her there. Dottie didn't have to bowl 300s to prove it to me.

Stella called a couple of days after she'd left, wanting to know about her plants. I lied and told her I'd taken care of them. I didn't tell her that I had yet to work up the gumption to do it, but I didn't want to let the plants wither away, either.

I hadn't set foot inside Daddy's house since his funeral. The screen door whined as I walked into a kitchen that reeked of spilled booze and loneliness. I opened the door to his workshop, breathed him in and cried him out. I gave Stella's plants a drink and left as fast as I could go.

The house may have been Stella's, but Daddy had willed the
Florine
to me. I knew that, come fall, I would have her hauled out, but right now her bobbing in the water with nothing to do was bugging me, as was the thought of the traps probably filled with lobsters sitting on the bottom of the bay. Then, as if they'd read my mind, Glen and Bud stopped by.

“We come to see if you wanted us to take the
Florine
out early mornings for a couple of weeks,” Bud said. He sat across from me at the kitchen table cradling a cup of coffee. Glen sat beside him, making fast work of a piece of blueberry cake I'd made that morning.

“Don't you guys have other jobs?” I said.

“We'll go as soon as we can in the mornings,” Bud said. “Fred will let me come in at noon.”

“Ray don't care,” Glen said. “Anyways, I'm leaving in a month.”

“I'd be glad of the help,” I said. “I'll go, too.”

“You don't have to do that,” Bud said.

“I know,” I said. “My boat, though.”

“Wait till your leg gets normal,” Bud said.

“Make sure we got something for breakfast in the morning,” Glen said, sucking cake from his fingers with a smack.

So I filled thermoses with coffee and made muffins and cinnamon bread and coffee cakes. Glen stopped by every morning at about four thirty to pick up the goodies, and out they went. They came back before noon. Although I told them to keep half of the money, they gave me all that Stinnie paid them. I stuffed most of it behind the brick in back of the stove.

Madeline held a going-to-college cookout for Dottie in the middle of August. She was due to leave on Saturday, the 23rd of August, for freshman “orientation.” She was pleased to go early, because, as she told me, “I can get the hang of the bowling alley.”

“Things will be hectic then,” Madeline said to me at Ray's a couple of days before the party. “You know Dottie. We'll be packing her up while she's driving up the road.” I baked chocolate chip cookies—Dottie's favorite—and took them to the Buttses' house on a beautiful Saturday afternoon. Bud and Glen were there, along with Ray, Ida and Sam, Evie and Maureen, and Susan.

I hadn't seen Susan since before Daddy's death, and I hadn't noticed her around The Point, either. It appeared that she had forgotten or put our talk behind her, though, because when I put the cookies down on the table, she walked up to me and hugged me. Her long hair whispered over my shoulders as she said, “I'm so sorry about your dad.”

“Thanks,” I said.

“How are you doing?”

“Okay,” I said. Dottie came over then, snatched the plate of cookies off the table and ran for the house with them tucked under her arm, which made everyone laugh. I followed her into the house and helped Madeline and Ida with the food.

After we ate, Susan, Dottie, and I found ourselves sitting close together, chairs facing the harbor. The summer sun sank its needle claws deep into the pores of my face.
“You have my skin,
”
Carlie had said.
“You burn easy.”
I opened my eyelids to slits, watching the glitter on the water, half listening to Dottie and Susan talk about school. I was happy to just be sitting there, but Susan drew me into the talk. “What are you going to do, Florine?” she asked.

“About what?” I said.

“Your life,” Susan said. “I mean, will you stay here or what?”

“I don't know,” I said. “Who knows?”

Susan plowed on. “You can get your GED,” she said. “Go to night school.”

“I plan to do that,” I said.

“Bud is coming up to Orono. He can work up there and he might go to school. We'd be close, that way,” Susan said.

My heart thwacked against the front of my thin summer shirt.

“It'd be great,” she continued. “In a couple of years, he can get a business degree and run his own garage, if he wants to, or do something else with it.”

The contents in my stomach churned into a squall as she kept on about Bud and herself setting up housekeeping. Finally, I got up and headed for Madeline's kitchen. She said, “You okay, honey? You're awful flushed.”

“Sunburn,” I said. “Tired, I guess. I'll be heading home.” I thanked her, we hugged, and I crossed the yard. But before I got too far, Bud called my name. I turned to face him, going to stone so I wouldn't cry. “Madeline said to give you this,” he said, holding out the cookie dish.

“Thanks,” I said. It amazed me that I had been so sure of us such a short time ago. Daddy's death had set me to reeling, and I now knew that nothing was certain. I could plan all I wanted, but things went the way they went, and I would have to weather the changes. Still, Bud's ignorance over how he must have known I felt was getting on my nerves. He could have his stupid girlfriend. I would be fine. That, I knew.

“You okay?” he asked.

“Why does everybody ask me that?” I snapped. I took the dish from him. I started to walk away, but then I turned around and said into his startled face, “You know, I would have gone anywhere with you, you dumb ass,” then I crossed the road to Grand's house. I went right to bed and sank into sleep to shut down my head and calm my heart. Tomorrow I would begin my life, again, but for now, sleep was what I craved to keep both the dead and live people at bay.

It was dark when I woke to the sound of someone driving a car very fast up the road toward Ray's. The tires spit pebbles that hit the side of Grand's house as the car flew past. “Hey, I'm sleeping here,” I said out loud, and rolled over to do just that for the rest of the night.

Summer twitched its tanned hips and sauntered deeper into August. Stella called to tell me that she was doing better, but that she would probably be staying with her sister at least until fall. I went over to Daddy's house twice a week and began moving the things I had left over there to Grand's house to sort through. Every item brought a memory as piercing as a mosquito bite. When the memories got to be too much, I got into my bathing suit and headed for the beach. The cool water and the sunshine cleared my head.

Dottie came over to my house the night before she left for school lugging some rosé she'd snuck from Madeline's liquor cabinet. I poured some into two red ruby glasses and we sat on the porch and pondered the wind herding the water this and that way.

We clinked our glasses together. “Knock 'em dead,” I said. “The world needs a dose of Dottie Butts.”

“Could use a dose of you, too.”

“Don't know about that.”

“You can do all them things Grand taught you,” Dottie said. “No reason you can't do anything else you want to do, too.”

“You sound like Susan.”

“I come to this by myself.”

We took big gulps of wine at the same time and rocked back and forth for a bit.

“Truth is,” I said, “I'm scared something might go wrong. Someone might die.”

“Can't live your life thinking that,” she said. “If I die, it won't be your fault, most likely. Probably be something stupid I do to myself. Can't worry about that.”

“I suppose not,” I said. We got drunk that night, but she managed to rumble up the road in her overpacked car the next morning as her family and I waved goodbye to her.
No reason you can't do anything you want to do,
she'd said to me.

I was picking tomatoes in the side garden on the Monday of the last week in August when Bud and Glen came by to tell me that Tuesday would be the last day that they would take the
Florine
out into the bay.

“I got to leave on Friday,” Glen said. “Army ain't going to wait.”

“I guess not,” I said. “Anyway, thank you both.”

“You want us to have her hauled out?” Bud asked.

“No. I'll take care of it. You both have other things to do.”

Bud shrugged. “Not really.” My nails dug into the skin of the ripe tomato I was holding and my fingers plunged into the warm, wet center of it. I sucked the juice off my fingertips.

Glen said, “We got to get going.”

“I know,” I said, and they left, walking up toward Ray's store. As I watched them go, I sent a silent prayer to Glen's back, wishing him a safe journey and return. I sent the lump in my throat Bud's way.

I couldn't sleep that night. What was left of the August moon cast a dim glow on Grand's bedroom wall. My head spun, trying to untangle itself from the past, from my near-death experience with Andy, from my wasted love for Bud, and from my own fear. I needed to clear a path to a possible future. “I don't want to be left behind,” I said to the wall. Dottie, Glen, and Bud were leaving The Point. If their luck held, they would come back, but they would live their lives outside of it, most likely. Did I want to stay here without them? Did I want to live across from Stella and fade away? Did I want to ping-pong between Ray's store, the harbor, and the woods? Did I want to grow old alone?

Was this it?

My body wriggled on the bed, seeking relief from the churned-up thoughts swamping my brain. “You would think,” I said to the wall, “that all the dead people in my life might put in a good word for me with someone.” Then I felt bad. Maybe they had other things to do. “I'm sorry,” I said to them all. “I don't know how to get going. I don't know what to do. If you get a minute, drop a hint, okay?” That said to whoever might be listening, my mind settled. The warm night held the promise of a good morning. Things would be clearer then.